The Cheese Board (35 page)
Authors: Cheese Board Collective Staff
In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh
Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner;
the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton
that speaks in a sensuous riddling tongue like Druids.
O cheeses of gravity, cheeses of wistfulness, cheeses
that weep continually because they know they will die.
O cheeses of victory, cheeses wise in defeat, cheeses
fat as a cushion, lolling in bed until noon.
Liederkranz ebullient, jumping like a small dog, noisy;
Pont l’Evêque intellectual, and quite well informed; Emmentaler
decent and loyal, a little deaf in the right ear;
and Brie the revealing experience, instantaneous and profound.
O cheeses that dance in the moonlight, cheeses
that mingle with sausages, cheeses of Stonehenge.
O cheeses that are shy, that linger in the doorway,
eyes looking down, cheeses spectacular as fireworks.
Reblochon openly sexual; Caerphilly like pine trees, small
at the timberline; Port du Salut in love; Caprice des Dieux
eloquent, tactful, like a thousand-year-old hostess;
and Dolcelatte, always generous to a fault.
O village of cheeses, I make you this poem of cheeses,
O family of cheeses, living together in pantries,
O cheeses that keep to your own nature, like a lucky couple,
this solitude, this energy, these bodies slowly dying.
• • •
THE CHEESE COUNTER
is where we get to know our customers. The interaction over the wooden counter is the most intimate one we have with customers in the store. Here there is time to chat and exchange ideas. Discussions range over many topics, but cheese lore is a constant. Our customers educate us, and we hope to do the same for them. Our patrons are sometimes in a hurry, but usually they value the chance to pass the time in a more leisurely way than most places outside our doors.
We have over three hundred different kinds of cheese, crammed with some logic into two venerable cheese cases that have been with us for twenty-five years. The array of cheese can seem intimidating to new customers. They often seem to think, mistakenly, that they need to know something before they can make a purchase. Nothing could be further from the truth. That is why we offer tastes of everything we sell. The best description of a cheese pales beside the immediacy of the actual taste.
The exchange between our customers and us occurs on many levels. Between clerk and patron lies the case full of cheeses, over which we talk, advise, and consume. The talk is usually light, sometimes flirtatious, and often humorous. Sometimes (actually, quite often) our task is to identify a cheese described by a customer. They might have eaten it in the Dordogne on vacation, or it was the key ingredient in their grandmother’s dish, or they had it three days ago, but the name eludes them. Other times, we are asked to help select party cheeses or figure out the best match for a recipe. All these interactions have the flavor of a treasure hunt about which we are fortunate enough
to have privileged knowledge. There is a bond formed over a mutual love of food, especially cheese.
We are blessed with extraordinarily loyal customers who are very patient as they stand in long lines on busy Saturdays, and put up with shortages of fresh Mozzarella during tomato season. Seeing people advising each other about how to figure out the workings of the Cheese Board and exchanging tastes as they stand side by side is one of the things that makes clerking the cheese counter so much fun.
fun.
I have always felt that if I hadn’t tried to become an artist, I would have become a writer of short stories because I love the short-story form. I have always said that each customer who comes in feels like a short story to me. Some are very interesting, some are shy, some live fabulously entertaining lives, some are obviously eccentric, but they are all fascinating.
Cheese is basically a way of preserving milk. Milk spoils easily, but transformed into cheese it can be stored for long periods of time. (There is a story of a Swiss cheese, Saanen, that is eaten at the baptism of a baby and saved to be served years later at the wake of the same person.) While food preservation is no longer the issue it once was, we are left with the legacy of cheeses that were developed to address this issue.
Cheese is created by manipulating curdled milk in a variety of ways. Milk is curdled with an array of products, the most common being rennet, a coagulating agent derived from the stomach lining of calves or lambs. Many cheeses made in the United States, Scandinavia, and England now use a vegetarian equivalent—either a microbial or vegetable-based rennet. Other curdling agents, such as the sap of fig trees or an infusion of nettles, are used in traditional Sicilian and Portuguese cheese
making.
After curdling, the cheese-making process continues with a variety of steps. Depending on the type of cheese, the process may include cutting the curd with different types of cutting tools; heating the curd; molding and pressing the curd to expel more of the whey; and salting the outside of the formed cheese with dry salt or immersing it in brine. The final formed and salted cheese may be rubbed with lard or oil, wrapped with cheesecloth, encouraged to form a rind, smoked, or, in the case of blue cheese, pierced with needles. (While fresh cheeses, such as cream cheese and Ricotta, employ curdling and draining, unlike aged cheeses they are not encouraged to develop a rind or to ripen.)
The three cheeses discussed below—Gruyère, Roquefort, and Taleggio—illustrate the many steps that are required to make a cheese.
This Swiss cheese is smooth textured, unlike the holey cheese many people expect from that country, and is sweetly nutty on the tongue. It also melts beautifully. Gruyère arrives in our store in eighty-five-pound wheels, making cutting it into smaller, easy-to-use pieces a laborious task. This cheese is made in a number of towns in the region surrounding the town of Gruyère.